10 FREE Gardening Hacks You’ll Wish You Knew Sooner! 🌱🤯 || Visit Our Garden

Hey guys, how's it going? We're going to be talking about 10 free ways to upgrade your garden. And I am so excited to bring you this video. I've got a couple more ideas that I cannot wait to share with you guys. So let's jump into it. My 10 free garden hacks that are actually beautiful, that you will love to use in your garden that are also free. First one that I wanted to talk about is doing cake stands as bird feeders. And I have used this for probably about three years in my own garden now. And I love it. I got an old cake stand that was no longer serving its purpose inside my house. And so what I did is I just brought it outside, filled it up with bird seed and it made the birds go crazy. I was able to just place it out on the little platter and to be able to see all these little birds jumping around. It was so much fun. We had at one point about 20 birds enjoying the cake stand and it was just magical. So cake stand no longer serving its purpose inside the kitchen and use it as a beautiful way to be able to feed the birds. My second tip is to use an old terracotta pot or any pot that has a saucer and use that saucer as a lid. I like to do this in my vegetable garden area or my cut flower garden as it is now. And I have an old terracotta pot that I keep all of my clippers, I'll keep gloves, I'll keep tags. I keep all the things that I need in the garden in that one area that I'm constantly losing in an old terracotta pot. Take the saucer, put it right on top of it. And then you have a way that all of your stuff is protected from rain or from sun. Nothing's going to get to it. And then I've always got my clippers, my pruners, my gloves, everything that I need right there in one place. The third option is always fun because I love to do this. It's repurposing old containers. I was actually gifted this old trash can. It was something that somebody was going to throw away. And I said, don't you dare. And I went ahead and I took it and I turned it into a planter. And I love that it is a planter and that it's getting a second life. It didn't have any drainage at the bottom. So I did go ahead and I drilled drainage at the bottom, threw a couple of plants in there and they've thrived ever since. So it's a great way to upcycle and get things for free from people that are just going to be tossing things into the dump. Number four is propagate. And I do this with a ton of plants and it's a great way to save money. And if you're not sure if something is able to propagate, I still think it's worth a try. That is how I learned how to propagate. I took clippings of an old coleus that was going to die in the wintertime anyways. And I took a couple of cuttings, put it in some water, threw it in my window sill, and all of a sudden it grew roots. And I was obsessed with propagating plants. I had way more plants than I ever needed. It's a great thing to do in the fall time, right before a frost comes, go out, take some cuttings of some things that you would really like to have next year that are annuals, throw them in some water, see if they grow roots. Not everything will, but a lot of things will grow roots in the water. And it's a great way to be able to get a bunch of plants and save money the next year. Number five is to use old vases as garden closures. So this is something that I do in my own garden and I have loved using it for a couple of years now. I get questions about it every single time. I will use mason jars and I will use old vases that we are no longer using. Take them, flip them upside down, put it over some plants that I've planted out a little bit early to make sure that they don't die in a frost. So this is going to really extend my season in my growing zone. I'm in a zone 9a and so we don't really get a frost very often, but we will occasionally get a frost. And there's some things that I'll plant out very early that I want to make sure that live on. You can buy closures for hundreds of dollars, or you could just use an old spaghetti mason jar, flip it upside down and give your plant a little bit of extra protection. Number six is something that we do inside our house and I haven't really done it outside except for on a coffee table. And it's to use plates as saucers instead of using a saucer that matches your planter. What I like to do is I like to go to the thrift store or use old plates that we're no longer using in the house and I will use them as saucers. Let me show you one example right here. This pothos right here has a beautiful terracotta pot and finding terracotta saucers is very easy. The problem with terracotta saucers is that they absorb the water and then they spread it out and it doesn't actually protect your surface unless you're getting terracotta saucers that are sealed on the inside. So what I like to do is just grab some ceramic plates and I like to just use these. The water is not going to go anywhere. It's not going to seep through and they will last absolutely forever. I think it adds a little bit of charm. I like to find ones that are a little bit more decorative and I usually can find them at the thrift store for less than a dollar a piece and then we will sometimes we'll use them in our house and after I've decided to switch up the plates in the house, then they become plant saucers. Number seven is during the growing season, taking that bird feeder that you turned into a cake stand and turning it into a pollinator drinking station. So this is what we normally do is in the winter months it'll be a bird feeding station because the birds are having a hard time foraging for food at this time. But in the summer and spring months, there's plenty of stuff for them to eat. And so we try not to feed them during the spring, summer and fall months. There's enough for them to eat. You don't want them to have to become reliant on you. So what we'll do is we'll turn it into a drinking station for our pollinators that we want to attract into our garden. You take your plate stand, throw a couple rocks on it from the garden and you fill it up with water daily, making sure that all of your little pollinators have a place that they can crawl out and a place that they can get lots of water. Throwing those rocks in there means that if one goes into the water and they can't get out, they can use a rock to climb up and get out of the water. Number eight is one of my absolute favorite hacks and it is to utilize Facebook. So we went and we found a whole bunch of bricks and I am so happy that we found these bricks. We got them for free from Facebook. Somebody was doing a renovation and they wanted all of these bricks gone. They said, come take as many or as little as you would like. And I loaded up my vehicle with as many bricks as I could possibly find. And I loaded it up full. We came home, I have them in a pile. I only use them for one little project at this time, but I do plan to utilize them and turn them into something beautiful. I just did not want to miss out on that option. So I didn't have a place for them, but I knew that in the future, I would be using them. So utilizing Facebook for something that even if you don't have a place for it at this exact moment, knowing down the road, I wasn't going to miss out on some free bricks. Number nine is to give things a new life by painting them. And we have a ton of extra paint from all these little projects that we've done over the years on this house. And I had a swan planter that I wanted to upcycle and what we decided to do was give it a facelift with some paint. The project was free and I used some old spray paint. I used a plastic bag to give the thing a whitewash look and it cost me absolutely nothing. It was just products that I had sitting around. And so I think upcycling things like that in your garden by giving them a new facelift with lots of paint can bring new life to the garden and give things a brand new look. Number 10 is one that I think most people should do in their garden if not everyone and it's create a little bug hotel. I love the idea of a bug hotel except you can find them online from anywhere from 20 to $150 for a bug hotel. And I think that that's a little bit ridiculous. So what you can do is you can go into your backyard, find some sticks, find some twigs, find these little things, find some leaves, some pine cones and shove them in a box and put that box somewhere tucked away. That way it's not sitting in the sun. It's not sitting in the water, somewhere that it's shaded and protected. And what that's going to do is give the beneficials in your garden a place to hide during the day. And I think that that is so important to add to your garden and bring a little place for all of these beneficials that you really truly want and make sure that they can stay nice and safe. We have some old bamboo stakes that we've used and you just shove those in there. It gives a great place for the woodcutter bees to go in and hide and make their little babies that they need. And woodcutter bees are a great pollinator into your gardens. So definitely add a bug hotel into your garden, especially because you can do it for free. Don't be paying $60 for a bug hotel. So those are all of my tips and tricks, my 10 free garden advice that I suggest you do in your garden to add some big impact. You will thank me later. Make sure you're following along for more garden tips and tricks just like these ones. Thanks for visiting our garden. I'll see you all in the next one. Bye guys.